City’s Next Taxi: A Nissan Van Short on Looks, Perhaps, but Full of Comforts

The next New York City taxicab will have airplane-style reading lights, passenger air bags, and a so-called low-annoyance horn, engineered to stifle flagrant honkers. The back seat even has more leg room than the old couch-on-wheels Checker cab.
But can a minivan win over New York?
The Nissan NV200, a bulky four-door van that seems more soccer mom than Travis Bickle, will become the all-but-exclusive vehicle of the city’s taxi fleet, the Bloomberg administration said on Tuesday, in the culmination of a contest of several years to redesign a city icon.
The minivan has a traditional, unstylish look, which even Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg conceded resembles a family car. Asked on Tuesday if the car had a suburban feel, the mayor smiled and replied, “That’s probably true.”
But the interior features, designed specifically for New York taxi use, promise comforts geared toward a more urban creature: power outlets to plug in phones and laptops; a transparent roof for city views; exterior lights that warn cyclists and pedestrians about opening doors; and custom climate controls for each seat.
Even honking, that great urban scourge, could be on the way out. Besides the low-intensity horn, the entire cab will be illuminated, outside and in, whenever its horn sounds, the better to help police track down noisy cabbies.
The first batch of the vans — a customized version of the ones now sold in Asia and Europe — is expected to appear by the end of 2013. Cab owners will be required to buy the Nissan vans when their existing vehicles are due for replacement.
By the end of the decade, almost every yellow cab in the city — there are currently about 13,000 — is expected to be a Nissan, the first time a foreign manufacturer has dominated the taxi fleet since the original red French Darracq cabs arrived in 1907.
The city announced its Taxi of Tomorrow competition in 2007 as a way to create a taxi better suited to its passengers. The prize: an exclusive 10-year contract worth an estimated $1 billion in sales.
The Nissan model, which will be built in Mexico and eventually be capable of running on an electric-only engine, beat out contenders from Karsan, a Turkish company that submitted a stylish, high-concept design, and Ford, maker of the fleet’s current mainstay, the macho Crown Victoria, which Ford plans to discontinue this year.
There were grumblings about the city’s selection even before the official announcement. Advocates for the disabled lamented the Nissan’s lack of options for wheelchair users, while supporters of Karsan, which pledged to build its cabs in Brooklyn, said the city had ignored a chance to invest in the local economy.
A spokesman for Mr. Bloomberg said that the holders of medallions for cabs intended for the disabled would still be allowed to buy specially designed cabs fitted for wheelchairs.
In a letter, the public advocate, Bill de Blasio, asked the city comptroller, John C. Liu, to review the taxi competition for potential conflicts of interest. And Micah Z. Kellner, a state assemblyman who co-signed the letter, has filed a complaint with the Justice Department to see whether the city’s choice violated the Americans With Disabilities Act.
“Who knew that the Taxi of Tomorrow was the delivery van of yesterday?” Mr. Kellner wrote in a statement. “Just because you paint a van yellow doesn’t make it a taxi.”
But Mr. Bloomberg, at a news conference on Tuesday announcing the selection, called Nissan’s bid “far and away the best,” and said the city chose the manufacturer that could provide the most reliable vehicle “that meets our city’s very peculiar needs.”
The mayor added that he was skeptical about the feasibility of Karsan’s proposal for a Brooklyn taxi factory. “I don’t think between now and two years from now we could site a new school, much less a new industrial plant,” Mr. Bloomberg said.
The custom version of the Nissan van has not yet been built, but company representatives said they expected to present a prototype in the next few months. The van holds a maximum of four passengers — three in the back and one in the front.
Its seats are coated to resist stains and bacteria, and the floors are equipped with lights to ease the recovery of purses and briefcases on a late-night ride. The charging station includes a regular outlet and two USB ports. Sliding doors will prevent “dooring” of cyclists and passing cars.
The Nissan could be a throwback to the earlier days, when passenger-controlled radios came standard in spacious cabs like the DeSoto Skyview.
“Until the 1970s, cabs weren’t bad,” said Graham Hodges, a taxi historian and former cabby. “They were good and roomy cars; they would fit five people easily. People didn’t complain about them being nasty and unpleasant.”
The city appears to be aiming for that earlier era. “Cabs today do not inspire the same type of affection and customer loyalty that the Checker did,” David S. Yassky, the chairman of the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission, said on Tuesday. “The goal in this process was to get us a taxi that people will talk about 20 years from now the way they talk about the Checker today.”
So can a Nissan van attract a similar cult? Mr. Bloomberg, asked about the romance of the taxicab at the news conference, turned to look at an image of the van projected on a large screen.
“Looks romantic to me,” the mayor said, with a “What can you do?” tone, as the room erupted in laughter.